a447 wrote:I visited In Touch Spa on my most recent visit to Taipei and liked it quite a lot. It's a little hidden on a small alley near 101, but easy to get to. Seemed pretty busy.

I went to Royal Spa once and was a little frustrated. Super hot masseur but he wouldn't let me touch him at all and kept his underwear on the whole time.

I will return to Taiwan in April. I am trying to convince a lovely guy in Taipei that i have been dating for the last year to join me in Australia for a holiday or more. He has been working like a slave at a fashion store since leaving the army but it is difficult to get him away from.his family and beloved Taiwan. The long hours these guys are expected to work for low wages should make it attractive to go overseas but that is not always the case. Maybe i will just stay in Taiwan longer and go to language school so we can spend more time together.

I have never tried the massage places in Taipei so if you could please provide more information about the type and quality of the massage that you experienced. Also the prices for the massages and any extras if provided would be appreciated.

I have heard that Firecat69 has reposted this thread on the gaythailand chat room along with the hope I will not be "mad". Firecat69, I am delighted you enjoyed the report and hope others on the gaythailand board will be as interested in visiting. If any member there has any questions I will be delighted to try and answer them here - as I am sure aussie.. will. Apologies, though, I got my easts and wests mixed up at a couple of points. To get to the hot springs you do take the MRT to Shipai station but it is to the west of the city. And the Dandy Daan Park hotel is on the west end of the park. The university is close to the east!

With the renewed interest in visiting, appreciation of this historical event--known as the "228 incident"--in Taiwan's relatively brief history offers some cultural background.

From South China Morning Post

Supporters of Taiwan independence and cross-strait unification clashed on Tuesday at a Taipei hall built in memory of the nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, as the island commemorated the 1947 massacre in which the Chiang was blamed for killing thousands of Taiwanese 70 years ago.

Claiming the late Chiang should be held responsible for the massacre, a few hundred pro-independence activists marched to the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in an attempt to tear down the bronze statue of Chiang.

“Take down the [statue of the] perpetrator who massacred our people,” shouted the activists. “No more worship of the dictator.”

Fist fights erupted as members from both camps traded barbs over what each viewed as the faults of the other side and whether the late KMT leader was accountable for the massacre 70 years ago. The clash, which left several people injured, was finally ended by police who blocked the two groups from continuing the melee.

They encountered a group of pro-unification activists who had occupied part of the memorial in a bid to re-fly a Taiwanese flag lowered to half mast to mark the 70th anniversary of the tragedy known by locals as the “228 incident”.

As many as 28,000 people, mostly Taiwanese, were killed during a military suppression of an uprising which started on February 28, 1947. Chiang was reported to have decided to send nationalist troops from China to suppress the unrest at the request of the then local KMT government led by Chen Yi.

Thanks everyone for sharing. My first trip to Taipei in Dec 2016 was a full success, and the next is already booked for May 2017.

Money: I exchanged some THB to TWD at Superrich Ratchadamri, and then got more from ATM in Taipei.

Hotel: I wouldn't pay anywhere near 90 USD per night, but there are reasonably priced hostels with dormitories for eqivalent of 500 THB per night. And if I don't take anyone home, that's fine for me.

Flights: I paid around equivalent of 8500 THB for my previous and upcoming flight. You could have a lot of fun in SEA mainland for that. And flight times can be inconvenient. E.g. I don't want to fly before 12 so I don't have to get up early, but I want to arrive before 20 so I have time to get to my hotel by public transport, that leaves a narrow window or I have to compromise.

90 days visa free entry for Germans!

I'll end just by reminding you that Taipei is not Bangkok or Pattaya. You will need a bit of adjustment.

But coming from Europe, it feels civilized like at home: good public transport, mild weather, clean sidewalks, no scams, fewer cars than in Bangkok/Jakarta/Phnom Penh/whereever, English widely spoken AND cute boys and low prices!

readerc54 wrote:Claiming the late Chiang should be held responsible for the massacre, a few hundred pro-independence activists marched to the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in an attempt to tear down the bronze statue of Chiang

Chiang was a little, bald-headed, narcissistic, thieving, murderous dictator (nicknamed "Peanut"!). Of that there is no dispute. After Sun Yat Sen's death, he manoeuvered himself into the leadership of Sun's party, the Kuomintang, a position he was able to maintain only with help from various warlords and the infamous Shanghai triads. Yet as Japan was taking over chunks of China during the 1930s, the USA came to believe that Chiang was the heroic embodiment of the new China, a true democrat who was trying to lead China to democracy - and so had to be supported.

Not all believed that fiction. One of the true American heroes posted to China in the 1930s and 40s, General Joseph Stilwell actively disliked America's involvement with Chiang. He talked of the USA being "forced into partnership with a gang of fascists under a one-party government similar in many respects to our German enemy."

Unfortunately for Stilwell, most believed in Chiang. Chiang's Christian, American-educated wife, one of the famous Soong Sisters (another had married Sun Yat Sen), helped sway western public opinion. Americans were totally beguiled when Soong Mei Ling visited - and conned. When she addressed Congress in February 1943, her audience was enraptured. One Congressman is quoted as saying, "Goddam it, I never saw anything like it. Mme. Chiang had me on the verge of bursting into tears!" She had already charmed the publisher of Life magazine which described the members as being "captivated . . . amazed . . . dizzied" by her "grace, charm and intelligence."

Talking to Earl Mountbatten, the Supreme Allied Commander in South-East Asia, Chiang boasted that "the President would refuse him nothing. Anything I ask he will do." By then, though, Roosevelt disliked him - "a flighty fool" was his description after the 1943 Cairo Conference. Even so, Taiwan under Chiang was to maintain the image of a world power and retain China's permanent seat at the United Nations Security Council until 1971.

Apart from his various memorials, Chiang is largely a forgotten figure amongst most of the younger generation in Taiwan.

Quotes from Barbara Tuchman's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography "Stillwell and the American Experience in China 1911-45".

It still surprises me that Taiwan seemingly remains such a central but much muddled point of consternation in US foreign policy. If push comes to shove, America will go to war on behalf of Japan or South Korea. But regarding Taiwan, that will always default to diplomacy.

As she helped us understand the beginnings of WWI in The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman doesn't mince words as she describes the corrupt character of Chiang. If not for Madame Chiang, the real brains of the two, it's unlikely he would have even made it to Taiwan at all. When she died at 105, the NY Times obituary captures her immense role in the nationalist movement, shaping America's China policy and early history of Taiwan.

From NY Times

Madame Chiang Kai-shek, a pivotal player in one of the 20th century's great epics -- the struggle for control of post-imperial China waged between the Nationalists and the Communists during the Japanese invasion and the violent aftermath of World War II -- died on Thursday in New York City, the Foreign Ministry of Taiwan reported early Friday. She was 105 years old.

Madame Chiang, a dazzling and imperious politician, wielded immense influence in Nationalist China, but she and her husband were eventually forced by the Communist victory into exile in Taiwan, where she presided as the grand dame of Nationalist politics for many years. After Chiang Kai-shek died in 1975, Madame Chiang retreated to New York City, where she lived out her last quarter-century.

Madame Chiang was the most famous member of one of modern China's most remarkable families, the Soongs, who dominated Chinese politics and finance in the first half of the century. Yet in China it was her American background and lifestyle that distinguished Soong Mei-ling, her maiden name.

For many Americans, Madame Chiang's finest moment came in 1943, when she barnstormed the United States in search of support for the Nationalist cause against Japan, winning donations from countless Americans who were mesmerized by her passion, determination and striking good looks. Her address to a joint meeting of Congress electrified Washington, winning billions of dollars in aid.Continue reading the main story

Madame Chiang helped craft American policy toward China during the war years, running the Nationalist Government's propaganda operation and emerging as its most important diplomat. Yet she was also deeply involved in the endless maneuvering of her husband, who served uneasily at the helm of several shifting alliances with Chinese warords vying for control of what was then a badly fractured nation.

readerc54 wrote:It still surprises me that Taiwan seemingly remains such a central but much muddled point of consternation in US foreign policy. If push comes to shove, America will go to war on behalf of Japan or South Korea. But regarding Taiwan, that will always default to diplomacy

The default button was understandably reset after Nixon's visit to Mao and the normalisation of Sino-US relations. But I am equally dumbfounded about the attitude of the US prior to that point in the early 1970s. And I suspect it was largely the strength of the personality of Mme. Chiang tied to three misguided and popular US postwar policies - who "lost" China, McCarthy's crusade against communists and the domino theory.

The facts surely have to be that the US was responsible for all three. When Japan started its military incursions into Manchuria, the US had no resolve to intervene, largely because of its isolationist policies and it no doubt quite liked the idea that the Japanese in the new Machukuo formed a buffer between "democratic" China and Soviet communism expansionism. After 1945 it was the US that insisted China be one of the five permanent members of the UN and despite misgivings in the White House, considerable aid was still channelled to Chiang and the Nationalists. Even though the Nationalist forces far outnumbered those of Mao, corruption and the fatigue of war resulted in Mao's victory and Chiang's retreat to Taiwan - a retreat he had known was likely at least two years earlier.

None of us will be old enough to recall the soul-searching which resulted in the USA as a result of the "loss" of China. It was not just the spread of communism to such a huge country, it was the propaganda spread by Mme. Chiang and her close friends like Edward Luce, the publisher of Time and Life. The influence of Christian missionaries who had once made up the largest group of foreigners in China can also not be ruled out, for they helped greatly to formulate opinion in middle-America.

The rise of McCarthy was certainly due in part to the loss of China, the communisation of Eastern Europe and the fear of further expansionism, the more so given that close to 3 million Chinese troops had entered the Korean War. The dividing of the Korean peninsula resulted in an ever-increasing desire of the democratic US to prop up Taiwan, even though it was still a repressive right wing dictatorship (as The Philippines was later to become under Marcos and yet still be propped up by the US). Thereafter Eisenhower's misguided domino theory further entrenched positions. And it was the total failure of Eisenhower and his foreign affairs advisers (and equally of the British and French) to understand that future nationalist movements in Asia were just that - nationalist rather than communist. Ho Chi Minh had written several times to both Roosevelt and Truman seeking assistance in getting rid of the French colonists. Truman felt he had greater need of both Britain and France in stopping the Soviets in Europe. Although strongly anti-colonial, the US administration would not strong-arm either country. And from that decision was to result the Vietnam War and the insurgency in Malaya.

All this fudge over Taiwan under its then repressive regime has given the US a huge 21st century problem. China ruled Taiwan for over 300 years. It only handed it over to Japan after its defeat in the 1895 Sino-Japanese War. Following World War II, the Allies returned it to Chiang and the nationalists. There have been endless learned discussions as to who really "owns" the island. Without US backing, I reckon it is almost certain Mao's troops would have taken it back. And surely there has to be more than a degree of legitimacy to China's claim. But thanks to US support, the island has fulfilled its potential by becoming mostly democratic in the western sense, with a population which has become both wealthy and desirous of deciding its own destiny. How China will accept that, I haven't the faintest clue. Had the Hong Kong experiment of "one country two systems" worked - as I thought it would and as it seemed to work in the first decade or so - it could have been the blueprint for Taiwan, and for that matter Tibet. With many more young Hong Kong people now seeking greater democratic reforms and Beijing so far unlikely to agree, that won't be the answer. I can only conclude that time will tell.

fountainhall wrote:All this fudge over Taiwan under its then repressive regime has given the US a huge 21st century problem.... I can only conclude that time will tell.

Agreed. I doubt that either China or the US are eager to push the envelope although both will surely continue to give it lip service to save face. The biggest card China can play in the meantime is economic. Taiwan has become a popular and quick getaway for a growing number of Chinese. I recall there was a small dip last year after China pulled the plug on flight frequency when the new Taiwan president took office but haven't heard any more about it since.

All in all, an interesting topic that doesn't get a lot of play with so many other developments in the region dominating the news.

If you haven't yet read The Imperial Cruise by James Bradley, I believe you'd enjoy it. Here's the opening paragraphs from the NY Times 2009 review:

James Bradley’s incendiary new book about Theodore Roosevelt is not really packed with secrets. Much of the material it discusses has long been hidden in plain sight. But Roosevelt biographers often subscribe to certain orthodoxies, and one of them is this: When Roosevelt made noxiously racist and ethnocentric remarks about Anglo-Saxon greatness, so what? He was just voicing the tenets of his time.

Mr. Bradley, the author of “Flags of Our Fathers,” does not simply cite Roosevelt’s egregious talk. He presents this much-ignored aspect of Roosevelt’s thinking with sharp specificity (“I am so angry with that infernal little Cuban republic that I would like to wipe its people off the face of the earth,” Roosevelt wrote in 1906) and then goes on to make a much more damaging point, angrily and persuasively connecting Roosevelt’s race-based foreign policy miscalculations in Asia. His thesis in “The Imperial Cruise” is startling enough to reshape conventional wisdom about Roosevelt’s presidency.